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Monday, November 17, 2014

'I think I'm going to have it,'
I said, joking between pains.
The midwife rolled competent
sleeves over corpulent milky arms.
'Dear, you never have it,
we deliver it.'
A judgement the years proved true.
Certainly I've never had you

as you still have me, Caroline.
Why does a mother need a daughter?
Heart's needle, hostage to fortune,
freedom's end. Yet nothing's more perfect
than that bleating, razor-shaped cry
that delivers a mother to her baby.
The bloodcord snaps that held
their sphere together. The child,
tiny and alone, creates the mother.

A woman's life is her own
until it is taken away
by a first, particular cry.
Then she is not alone
but a part of the premises
of everything there is:
a time, a tribe, a war.
When we belong to the world
we become what we are.

Thursday, November 06, 2014

This time last month I was in New York, all by myself.
I didn't take Nye and the girls, which is what everyone asked me, both before I went and while I was there. I
didn't take them because I was going to photograph a wedding and
flying four people to New York for a week is inconceivably expensive
and somewhat inconvenient when two of those people are three years
old. Which is when people looked askance and said 'doesn't your husband
mind babysitting the kids for a week?'When I'm done rolling my eyes
I explain that firstly, it's not babysitting if THEY'RE YOUR OWN
FUCKING CHILDREN. Then I tell them that he went to the Alps for 12
days in the summer to ride his bike down a big hill over and over and over again,
leaving all of us at home without him. At this point everyone breaths a sigh of
relief, the world makes sense again. Because god forbid that the scales of Who Does What weren't balanced in a relationship. . . I sort of
regret telling people about the Alps thing at all to be honest. The
version of myself that exists only in my head just says neutrally
'no, he doesn't mind. Should he?' and watches as people's sweet
little brains struggle with the idea of a man happily looking after
his kids for a week while his wife goes gallivanting. But my actual self doesn't want people to think that I'm a bitch, that my husband is
put upon or to make people uncomfortable. Sometimes I'm
deeply irritated by my actual self.

Anyway, New York. I went, by myself and it was both more than and less than and completely different to the trip I had played out in my head. I was there
to photograph the wedding of a dear dear friend and that bit was
exactly as wonderful as I imagined it would be; the wedding, the
husband (whom I hadn't yet met) and their relationship which was a
beauty to behold. But the rest of the trip - the me bit of the trip -
that was not what I was expecting.

It was in large part
because that imaginary version of myself is deeply, inescapably pervasive in my ideas of how things will be; how situations, conversations and interactions will go. Imaginary me is sharper
than real me, less socially conscious, more gregarious, outgoing and
funny. She cares less what other people think, both in good and not
so good ways. I had pictured her sitting in bars, laughing with strangers, going to see some plays or music
or literary stuff and meeting interesting people, staying out
late and immersing herself in the culture and life of New York City.
HA! I don't chat and I don't stay out late. I don't ever chat to people I
don't know, interesting or otherwise and I don't know why
exactly I thought I would do so just because I was away from home by
myself. I didn't talk to a single person without prior arrangement or specific need ('can I have a white wine? How much is this yarn?' (in the same glorious store!)) the whole time that I was there, which was fine, I don't like
chatting with strangers, it makes me anxious. Even when it goes swimmingly and people are interesting and funny and I come away thinking 'they
were nice', even then I leave with my heart racing, my adrenaline
flowing, my need to immediately find a dark and quiet place raging. I know it's not an ideal response and plenty of people have told me that I'm unfriendly/anti-social/weird, many times but I
would much rather eat and drink with a book in absorbed silence and
cut off any and all attempts by strangers to engage me with a polite
reply, a close-lipped smile and a pointed glance and whatever it is
I'm reading than start a conversation with someone I don't know. I went to therapy for a year but it took a week in New
York for me to accept a) that I am not the version of myself that
acts out the imaginary situations in my head and b) that THAT'S FINE.

That I didn't want
to talk to anyone but my family back home and the friends I was
seeing while I was there unlikely surprised anyone but me. When
people asked what it was that I was looking forward to about going away 'lots of food and lots of quiet' were always my answers; a break from the
constant chatter and noise of two almost-four year olds (do you know
how often almost-four year olds shut up? When they're asleep, that's
it.) It's easy to forget when you are a part of a family of four
people that spend most of their time together what it is like to be
alone. It's blissful, but it is also lonely, in almost equal measures (let's
call it 60/40).

Both the bliss and
the loneliness were good for me. The silence gave me space to do
nothing, to be nothing to anyone, to please only myself. To leave an
hour in the morning between waking up and doing something about
breakfast because absolutely no one but me was going to lose their
shit if they went hungry for more than five minutes. To go out at 9am
and stay out until whenever I wanted, because no one needed to come
home for a nap (actually, I really needed to come home for a
nap but after three days of waking up at 2.30am (7.30am GMT) ready to
get up and make breakfast for everyone, staying asleep at night was
more important than not sleep-walking through the days). To eat
somewhere noisy and crowded because I only had to fit myself in and
no one was going to get stressed about not being able to hear each
other speak. Or to buy some tortilla chips, guacamole and prosciutto
and eat the whole lot for dinner in bed, in my pyjamas, watching
Friday Night Lights. These things were all blissful. And then there
was turning the light off, switching my phone on and sobbing into my
pillow while swiping through pictures of Nye and the girls. Or
walking down the street behind families with small kids and realising
that I had missed the way home as I had become so entranced that I was effectively stalking
families with small kids wondering if I could just hang out with them
for a few minutes. Because I missed my family like breathing. I missed
them and I loved being by myself which is exactly how I would
want time away from my family to be. Had I been unable to spend time alone any more or had I not wanted to go back to them I might
have been a little worried, they might have been a little worried.

I was going to tell
you what I did and where I went, but honestly I mostly just wandered
around, slowly and hungrily. I took no photos with an actual camera
and I only felt bad about it for 3.4 seconds. I drank a lot of
coffee, mostly Australian it turned out. Why are Australians so good
at coffee? (Genuine question). I looked in shops full of useless crap
I didn't need and had no intention of buying and grocery stores full
of things I quite fancied but couldn't afford. I bought the most
expensive box of muesli of my life ($7 and no it wasn't from fucking
Wholefoods, before you ask, just a regular bloody grocery store. My
friends from Brooklyn are the only people in the world who have ever
gone to Iceland on holiday and found it 'no more expensive than
home.') I spent days walking slowly up one side of the street and then slowly back down the other, gazing wide eyed at truly terrible parenting
(bookstores are NOT playgrounds), eating yellow popcorn in the
cinema, drinking wine and spending my food budget on Japanese silk yarn. I ate food both amazing and
bizarre (a 'steak and cheese sandwich' is made with neither steak nor
cheese, fyi). I went to Williamsburg looking for the hipsters but
they weren't there. I met up with friends I have made through
blogging; some for the first time despite following each other's
lives for the last five years, others for the second or third time over the years and yet others who despite the
physical distance between us have become my dear friends, my people I
talk to when I need opinions and advice or just to shoot the breeze.
And it was the best. They are all the smartest, funniest, most
interesting and thoughtful women, the kind of people you want to
spend time with when you are missing your family and having a small
existential crisis. Not just because they're nice and funny and
spending time with nice and funny people is distracting, but because
they have smart, smart things to say, things to comfort and reassure
and inspire. They are good people, and a timely reminder that the
internet can bring magic and riches, not just stupidity and vileness.I've been back for almost a month now and it sort of feels like it never happened, like it was all a dream. At the moment everything that happened more than 6 hours ago feels like a bit of a dream though, I'm living in a perpetual state of too much coffee, not enough sleep, no exercise and too little time by myself that isn't sitting in front of a computer screen. I still have scar tissue on my feet from that first day I went out without socks on, I'm pretty certain that my digestive system is still working on that 'steak and cheese' sandwich, and the ache of missing my friends is definitely real. Oh, and I can't stop thinking about doughnuts. So, probably not a dream then.